Content area
Full text
TIMOTHY LARSEN. Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in Mid-Victorian England. Studies in Modern British Religious History, 1. Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1999. Pp. 300, bibliography, index. $63.00.
This three-part study examines the political campaigns, ambitions, and ideas of English nonconformity between 1847 and 1867. Part one provides an introductory assessment of the political stance of English dissent, including an analysis of the nonconformist grievances. The second part surveys the history of the disestablishment campaign, examines the principle of religious equality, and reviews controversies which arose from proposals to expand state education. The final section considers the broader themes of moral reform and national identity in England during the mid-Victorian period.
Despite the gains achieved through passage of the "constitutional revolution" of 1828-32-and despite obtaining something near to numerical equality with the Church of England-nonconformists continued to labor under a number of grievances, both practical and theoretical. These included church rates, restrictions on marriage and burial services, the absence of a legal registration outside the church of births and deaths, poor rates being charged to dissenting meeting-houses, and restrictions on the attendance of nonconformists at the ancient universities. Especially objectionable was the concept of establishment. By the 1840s, the key issue was therefore no longer toleration, as it had been a century before, or even the elimination of specific grievances, important as they were (and diminishing in salience as they got dealt with...